Jason De León

Jason De León is the Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a non-profit that raises awareness about migration and assists families searching for their missing loved ones and Professor of Anthropology, and Chicana, Chicano, and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. De León began his career as an archaeologist studying ancient tools in Mexico. During the course of archaeological fieldwork he met many people in Mexico who shared their often harrowing stories of migration with him. Inspired by those conversations, he began to study undocumented border crossings from archaeological, ethnographic, forensic, and visual perspectives. In his work, he investigates the lived experiences of people moving across various landscapes and borders to explain how poverty, violence, political instability, and climate change shape and fuel our current global migration crisis. For his internationally renowned work in shedding light on the complexity of migration and U.S. immigration policies, De León was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017.

Between 2000 and 2022, the bodies of over 3,600 border crossers were recovered in the deserts of southern Arizona with many more individuals still missing. In his award-winning book, The Land of Open Graves, and his lectures, Jason De León interrogates the U.S. border enforcement strategy known as Prevention through Deterrence (PTD). This federal strategy uses hyper-security measures around urban border zones to force migrants to cross through remote and depopulated regions where the natural environment functions as an impediment to human movement. This policy has resulted in the deaths and disappearances of thousands of people. Drawing on interviews from survivors and two decades of anthropological research, he concludes that not only did PTD fail to deter migration, but it turned border crossings into a deadly and violent social process experienced by millions of people. Recent increases in security measures at the US/Mexico border and across Mexico has led to a rise in robbery, extortion, and assault that has forced people to now rely on transnational gangs such as MS-13 for protection while migrating.

In his book, Soldiers and Kings, Jason De León outlines how human smuggling has changed since 2014 following a joint effort by Mexico and the United States to crack down on migration from Central America. Through the lens of anthropology, Soldiers and Kings provides an intimate and up-close look at the daily (and often dangerous) lives of those charged with getting people past immigration security forces. Human smuggling is a billion-dollar global industry that has long been understudied and misunderstood. Drawing on years of experience documenting the difficult and often brutal lives of the many Honduran smugglers he befriended in Mexico, De León illuminates the complicated nature of the border-crossing industry while introducing the reader to the many players who are caught up in its vicious cycle. Hailed as “An enlightening, frightening, unforgettable read” by Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street), Soldiers and Kings won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

As the director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a non-profit research, arts, and education collective, Jason De León raises awareness about migration issues while also working to help reunite families with their loved ones who died or disappeared while migrating. With the Undocumented Migration Project, De León has sponsored and organized the participatory art installation Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94), which is composed of over 3,800 handwritten toe tags. Each tag represents a migrant who died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2022, showing the exact locations where remains were found. With exhibitions in over 130 locations worldwide since 2020, the project raises global awareness about the realities of migration and the human costs of American border policies. De León’s work with the Undocumented Migration Project and his academic writing has been featured in numerous media outlets, including National Public Radio, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Al Jazeera, BBC, and Vice.

Jason De León is a 2017 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and a National Geographic Explorer. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Penn State University in 2008, and his bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from UCLA in 2001.